Cinema Red and Blue

Comet Gain's David Feck enlists members of Crystal Stilts, the Clean, the Aislers Set, and Ladybug Transistor for this indie pop supergroup.

"We tried hard to sound like the Swell Maps/ What a terrible name for a pop group," David Feck sings on Cinema Red and Blue's "Ballad of a Vision Pure". This might read like a throwaway line, but it sounds rueful and affectionate on record, a music vet happily and wearily reflecting on his youth. Feck, the songwriting force behind minor indie pop legends Comet Gain, is the ringleader for this loose, beery one-off ensemble, which could be called an "indie pop supergroup" if that weren't an inherently ridiculous idea. Nonetheless, members of Crystal Stilts, the Clean, the Aislers Set, and the Ladybug Transistor all pop by at various points, and the music shimmers and jangles with all the requisite bittersweet colors. But it is Feck's presence-- self-deprecating, gin-wry, tinged with bitterness-- that provides the emotional anchor for Cinema Red and Blue, a knowing and affecting power-pop record about the foibles of loving records too much.

"Ballad of a Vision Pure" is the first of three consecutive songs deemed the "ballad of" something (a bus stop, an "all-night worker") but every song could easily be retitled "Ballad of an Unreformed Pop Music Obsessive." Songs about listening to pop songs are not a novel concept; in indie pop in particular, they're a hallowed tradition. But Feck and co. do them so well, with verve and loving attention to details lyrical and musical. These are songs about lonely people yearning to escape into art-- Melanie of "Melanie Down" listens to her radio alone in her room, while the "cinema red and blue" of the title pops up repeatedly as a metaphorical space for losing yourself in an all-encompassing experience. Feck readily acknowledges the dark side to this yearning; in "Ghost Confessions", he sings mournfully about "listening to records that nobody wants/ Dreaming of moments that nobody's had/ Thinking of people that don't exist." Anyone who chuckled at the Swell Maps joke might recoil a bit from the sting.

But wallowing in self-recrimination is an indulgence, and a dead end. Feck's outlook on Cinema Red and Blue works so well because it neatly splits the difference between sourness and generosity. The sunny music helps; the jangly guitars are just as evocative next to a puttering drum machine as a boogie-rock organ. The album is rounded out by a handful of covers, (Dead Moon's "Love in the Altitude", the Chills' "Brave Words", "Same Mistakes" by Vic Godard and the Subway Sect); that they sit comfortably next to the originals highlights how well-conceived this one-off project is. The thread uniting the songs is not just a style but a sensibility, one Feck commandeers with the ease of an old Shakespearean actor. For all his ambivalence about the pull of pop-song love, he yields, finally, to affection, and Cinema Red and Blue glows with it. After that crack about trying to sound like the Swell Maps, he admits, fondly: "I was only trying to do something good/ I was only trying to waste my youth/ I was only trying to make some sweet noise/ I was only trying to be a boy."